Legend of the Overtransfer

As always, there's some good news and bad news when I record a new LD...

Schwing! Sparke sparkle.

In short, Anime 18 kicked my ass this time out. I could be a dick and argue that the black levels are borked on the R1 transfer, as it was done in the LD days when NTSC required black levels be IRE 7.5 and not 0 (not in the US anyway), so the difference isn't a "mistake" as much as it is just the way things are handled across the pond.

What you can't see in that shot is the rather horrific temporal dot crawl. While I stand pretty firm on the Lite-On recorder being good at getting rid of rainbows, the same can sadly not be said for the literal dot crawl that crops up between different colors.

The worst STD I've ever seen.

I know that ghosting plays a part in what we're seeing here, but the dot crawl is so bad we can literally see the tentacle-cock twice. I won't bother to show you the artifacting during rampant movement, either: the A18 DVD is progressive, the LD isn't, so even though my transfer has the higher bitrate there's almost nothing I can do to change that.

I really either need to stop comparing transfers or just capture shit to my HDD so I can use AVISynth/CCE SP from the start.

The good news is that the master plan was always to splice the Kanji credits into the Anime 18 transfer. Of course this was back when all I had to work with was a VHS tape, but I think the reasoning holds up well enough, and thankfully the first/last 5 minutes of the film are easier to restore and re-encode than the whole 108 minute feature. I'll back up the entire LD, of course, just to satisfy that horrid little OCD monster in the back of my head that says 2 seconds from 1 video version may not appear on a restoration that includes 12 minutes of never before seen footage, and if that 2 seconds goes missing I'm just going to be a bitter bastard forever for it.